Day 43: Waitomo to Mangaokewa River

Distance Covered: 26 km

What a day! It’s amazing how much variety can be packed into 26 km of walking.

We started with rain. We tried sleeping in to give it more time, but it became clear that it was going to patiently keep going on. So up we got, packing wet stuff into wet stuff to walk through wet stuff.

Te Kuiti, the true resupply point, was 17 km from Waitomo on the trail. The first half of it was ridge traversing. We went up the first ridge on trail after a brief road walk. Steep and on grass along a fence, the trail wound its way up. The way down was through a podocarp forest and this ended up being some of the most treacherous trail to date.

The way down was so steep that we actually saw (very rare) switchbacks. Awesome! Confusingly, the switchbacks themselves were not awesome. The narrow trail cut into the hill was not flat width-wise: It was probably 30 degrees sloped. The material was the light-brown potter’s clay that’s so slippery. It was raining. The podocarp make for poor handholds and few roots (probably why they had to build switchbacks).

I don’t know how many times we fell, or how far our combined sliding added up to. It was bad, though. There were some real challenging areas that once again had us wondering about how ready the trail is for as many people as they would like. Others we talked with later in the day brought up the same concerns.

But onward and forward, we headed up more ridges. The ways up were steep, but fortunately the ways down were a little better with grassy slopes instead of mud.

And then we crested a hill and there was the town just a couple of km away on the road. But if you think we went the easy way, then you haven’t been reading the blog! No, in an admirable quest to avoid road walking, we looped around in a big 7 km arc through hill country to approach from the side. It did stop raining about this time, so that was nice.

We actually enjoyed this part. Big, green, peaky hills with sweeping views of the surrounding valleys. True, it was some steep climbing. A picture below shows the side profile of one, for example, but the grass made for decent traction. We like this picture because it shows the kind of steepness we've been talking about throughout the blog, but the images never seem to quite capture what we're doing.

At the top of one of the peaks was this great view. We loved the way the sky transitioned from left to right.

And the sheep were fun. One paddock we walked through had a bunch of freshly shorn sheep that looked like clones. When they ran as a group it was mesmerizing.

Then it was another muddy, slippery forest trail into town that had us grasping at anything that might possibly get us down steep sections. It seems like locals must use crampons for their trails when it rains. We don’t know because we’ve never seen (or talked with anyone who has seen) locals on these trails. It’s a quandary.

Town was great. Buy all the delicious things! Eat all the delicious things! Buy more delicious things!

We had to buy 7 days of food, which ties the maximum we’ve carried. The difference now is that we eat a lot more and our eyes are bigger than the backs that support them. Our packs after shopping were heavy! Did I really need that pack of cookies? (Yes. Yes, I did.)

Then we headed out of town towards the river. We heard from another hiker about a couple of campsites along the way and aimed for the first to start. We wound through town then onto the river track.

The track started by following the tall, barbed fence by the industrial zone. A lumber mill and a lime works where they crush rock into gravel among them. The lumber mill smelled good. And then we got away from there towards a beautiful section of trail along the river. Forested with large, old trees and with a well maintained trail, this section was top notch. We made it to the first camping area by 6 PM. Great!

We made a special “first day out of town” meal with salmon and lime-chili sauce in noodles. Delicious. And then we did something we haven’t done before… we decided to hike more after dinner.

We had done a calculation of when we would show up in Taumarunui and discovered it would be late on Friday or on Saturday. This is a problem because the post office where we shipped our box of stuff to closes at 4 on Friday and is closed for the weekend. If we didn’t want to sit around for two days, we needed to get moving.

So we aimed for the next site, about 3.5 km downstream. It was pretty good track so far, so it should continue, right? We’ll be there in less than an hour. Once again, I think you have to appreciate our naive optimism.

We almost immediately left the good trail and it turned into that thing the Te Araroa does where it squeezes you between private land and the river. The land was hilly, with their slopes often plunging straight into the river. And those same width-wise sloping trails from this morning made an appearance. Except this time, the angled trail led to falls off the side that were steeper and deeper, the trail was more narrow, and it was actually washed out by erosion in many places. 

There were places where we had to leap several feet across gaps with heavy packs, some where the trail was less than our foot width wide, and nearly all of it was muddy from the rain from the last couple of days. We would get to one section after another and puzzle through how to make it through. And when we fell or were about to fall we would twist rapidly to clutch at grass or roots or whatever to stop from falling down the embankment. We talked with one hiker later who said he went full cliffhanger in one section where both feet slid out and he grabbed the trail just enough to prevent a big problem. Even still, he had fallen so far so fast that his chin was on the trail and the rest of his body was dangling over the side.

So this section took longer than expected. We made it to the camping area just as the last light faded, two hours after we started for it.

Funny story! We were running out of light and weren’t sure exactly where the camp would be. We found a flattish, chest-high, grassy area that maybe could have been “it”. We were walking through when Emily announced she saw another hiker ahead. She saw him go over the stile and wave as he went into the forest again. He was the one who knew about the campsite so it must be just a little further on. So we kept going. Another few hundred meters of bad track awaited, but then we found the true camping area. It is a wonderful little grove of tall pines with a table and chairs next to the river and flat areas for tents. We were glad we pushed on! The guy approached us to welcome us to camp and mentioned he had been there for an hour. So it wasn’t him who waved… and there was only dense forest between the two points so nowhere for anyone else to go… I put forth the theory that something like benevolent will-o-the-wisps were at play. Camping at the grass may have had dire outcomes!

Anyway, now we are in bed and looking forward to some sleep. Tomorrow we will try to push hard to get a ways down the trail so we can get to the post office in time.